Info:
Durations:
The Early Years - 52’ 31”
Maturity & Silence - 50’ 34”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1984
Contributors include:
Vladimir Ashkenzy / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra / Elisabeth Söderström / Boris Belkin
Awards:
Winner of Silver Medal at New York Festival, 1984
Special Jury Prize: Banff Television Festival, 1985
This is an intimate account, using Sibelius’s music and words, of a great artist’s struggle with his medium, with the world and with himself. The film also sets out to try and free Sibelius’s reputation from some of the unnecessary encrustations of history.
At the peak of his career Sibelius was hailed by almost every leading critic and composer in England as the greatest symphonist of the twentieth century. In addition, a survey by the New York Philharmonic Society in 1935 showed his music to be more popular with their concert-goers than that of any other composer in history; a degree of recognition in his own lifetime unequalled in Western music.
By the mid-1950's however, critics in England, and to a lesser extent in the United States, had reacted against the effusions of their forebears and relegated Sibelius to a position of minor importance. Views are changing again, and the time is right for a re-assessment of Sibelius’s work.
The film is made in the belief that if it is approached with a measure of understanding, Sibelius’s music offers rewards on the level of the greatest Masters in Western music, and it is made in the hope of contributing something towards that understanding.
Interviewed in 1984, Christopher Nupen (the director) said, “This is not a film about his life, it is not a film about what he did or where he went, but it is an attempt at a film about what he was trying to say to us, what he was trying to express in his music and the level of his aspirations. There is one sentence that I use several times in the film, he says – I feel the compulsion. The compulsion to write what is ultimately and forever right. Now, that means something that will speak to people now and always”.
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In the words of Donald MacLeod, host of BBC3’s Composer of the Week, “I’ve always had a particularly soft spot for the Sibelius films, I thought they were absolutely wonderful – masterpieces really. I mean if you had never heard a note of Sibelius’s music, I really feel that they would give you a fantastic understanding of what made him tick, of what he was trying to do and a wonderful sense of the poetry of the man responding to the landscape around him. It’s incredibly beautiful but absolutely true to the subject. He captures, absolutely, the essence of the man, with an extraordinary humanity”.
Our Films on DVD
This DVD celebrates the musical quest of one of the great symphonists of the twentieth century; Jean Sibelius, as seen through his music, his letters and the words of his wife Aino, who was with him for more than sixty-four years. His quest was not an easy one. Living through the great turning point in Western music, many of his concerns were strikingly similar to those of Schoenberg and Stravinsky but each chose a different path.
Sibelius once said that while his colleagues were serving multicoloured cocktails, he offered only pure spring water. The metaphor is a good one but, as so often with artists who take an untrod path, critical opinion has fluctuated wildly. In 1935 Sibelius was voted the most popular composer of all time by the members of The New York Philharmonic Society, a view that was echoed by many of the leading critics and composers in England.
By the 1950s critical opinion had relegated Sibelius to a position of minor importance.
Views are changing again and the time seemed right for an intimate look at what Sibelius himself felt that he was trying to achieve. The film in two-parts on this DVD is an attempt to do just that.
This DVD contains two of the most famous Schubert films — each entirely different from the other in style, content and spirit.
The first, The Trout, presents a youthful explosion of exuberant talent; starting with Schubert himself — who wrote his Trout Quintet when he was 22 years old. His lead is picked up and brought to life by five extravagantly gifted young musicians when they were barely older than Schubert had been when he wrote the piece. Their names: Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Jacqueline du Pré and Zubin Mehta.
The film was shot in a single week in August of 1969 and culminates with a performance of Schubert's Trout Quintet, filmed live on-stage at the new Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the south bank of the Thames, in London.
The second film, The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow, looks at Schubert's astonishing achievements in the last 20 months of his life - after the death of his god, Beethoven. He asked the question, "Who would dare to do anything after Beethoven”? The answer, of course, was Franz Peter Schubert, in the music which he wrote after Beethoven's death.
A film about the man who made himself the most talked about, the most famous, the most successful, the richest, and the most controversial classical soloist that the world of music has ever known.
The film on this DVD presents Paganini's music, filmed and edited in the style developed by Christopher Nupen and his colleagues for their prize winning DVDs about Sibelius, Schubert and Tchaikovsky and combines it with extracts from Paganini's letters and quotations from both his admirers and his many detractors.
While being hailed as the greatest performing musician of his time, Paganini was denounced again and again by knowledgeable critics as a charlatan in league with the devil and an avaricious man with scant respect for those who responded so enthusiastically to his unforgettable gift - and contributed so readily to his vast personal fortune.
In time this provoked envy and resentment and, finally, a pitiable isolation. By the time of his death, at the age of 57, his unbending quest for gold and for glory had robbed him slowly of almost everything else.
The bonus track is a sequence called Gidon Kremer, Perfectionism and the Thirteenth Caprice from Christopher Nupen's film Gidon Kremer: Man of Many Musics.
